Stupid science fiction-y thoughts

[jwgh]

As near as I can remember, this is something I devoted an afternoon of thought to back when I worked at a miniature golf course and essentially spent the whole day in a gazebo by myself with very little to do.

I had read some stories (maybe in science fiction books, maybe in comics, probably both) in which time stops for everyone except one person or group of people.

The two standard approaches to this situation are:

1) Time flows normally for you and you can basically do whatever you do normally while everyone around you appears to be frozen. (So you can breathe, gravity appears to be normal, you can pick up and move around objects that you would normally be able to move, etc.)

2) You're unable to change anything, so you can just walk around and observe things. In extreme versions of this you can't even move air, so you are stuck in place and suffocate. (I think Borges had a story where a guy who is about to be executed is frozen in time, so that even his body is completely immobile, but his thoughts are able to continue.)

I decided that the second version was more reasonable for various reasons. One of the ideas I came up with (or borrowed from somewhere -- it isn't the most original idea, but then few if any of my ideas are) is the situation where instead of time stopping it slows down for you. At or near the extreme this has a similar effect to scenario (2) above, but there should be some point at which your muscles are able to handle the (to you) increased inertia of everything around you, so that you can breathe, move things, and so on. (See, F=MA, and A=S/T2, so if 1 minute of your time = 2 minutes of the outside world's time, then you have to exert four times as much force [as far as you're concerned] to move the same amount of mass the same distance as if your times matched up, which to you feels like the object has four times as much mass. Right?)

Another thing that a sped-up person would notice would be that it was suddenly cooler. Air molecules would seem to be moving slower, and of course that corresponds to a lower temperature. If you were sped up enough you could be frozen to death at room temperature. [In my original post I got this backwards, because I am a dope.]

Of course, there's no particular reason that this time-speeding process should be restricted to living beings, so I next thought about what would happen if you modified a glass of water so that time for it passed twice as quickly as the outside world. How could you distinguish it from a normal glass of water? The previous discussion indicates that one method I thought of is that they would boil and freeze at different temperatures.

Then I started thinking of what would happen if you mixed sped-up water with normal water and eventually I realized that it was all more work than it was worth, even if it did let me pass the time at the old miniature golf course. There may be a way to make a nifty science fiction story out of this, but I don't know what it is.

[I thought about this whole thing again recently because this week's New Yorker contains an article by Oliver Sacks about people whose subjective senses of time differ from the norm. (Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be in the online edition.) The article doesn't have anything to do with any of the junk discussed above, of course.]

Comments

[muffyjo]

You learn something new every day. You see, I didn't realize that anyone had actually put together a formula, nor was I aware of the heat difference caused by the time slowing issue. FASCINATING! So if one were to travel backwards in time, you would bake before achieving any time regression whatsoever.

So, to counter act this, one would have to freeze, then slow time (thus immediately defrosting the individual). Maybe this is a good way to get around the whole "cells bursting upon defrosting" problem we currently have with the people frozen in various scientific facilities around the world.

Kind of like trying to jump up in an elevator just before it hits the ground when the cable snaps to avoid the impact of impact.

[jwgh]

Keeping in mind that the whole scenario concocted by my mini-golf-addled brane is pretty absurd, there are some other ways you could try to get around it, such as by being in a vacuum-surrounded room and time-travelling the entire room.

Also if you 'changed directions' quickly enough you could probably take the quick burst of heat, assuming that you could interact with the surrounding matter at all while you were travelling -- I think in the original HG Wells story the traveller was insubstantial while moving back and forth through time. I'm not sure what happens to standard formulas for force, accelleration, air pressure, etc. once you're actually travelling in the opposite direction in time from everything else, though. That would be pretty crazy.

Also, keep in mind that I don't know what I'm talking about!

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I, too, have spent much time considering this useless scenario.

I, too, started from point 2. I figured that if time is stop around you, it still needs to flow through your body for you to be conscious, and able to move. That raises the question of what would the boundary between space with stopped time and space with moving time would be like. It would obviously be impenetrable, because once a particle entered it, it would stop. Also, light would stop in the space where time was stopped, so you couldn't see it. Now that I think of it, I suppose you could apply Maxwell's equations in some form here and find the optics of the boundary. I'm guessing it would be perfectly reflective.

In the end, it turns out that stopping time is pretty boring.

[jwgh]

Oh, yeah, the light thing. Since you're the only thing that's moving I reckon you could walk around and not walk into things, although if you looked back you would see yourself which would be creepy. I guess if you stood still you would immediately seem to be inveloped in blackness since you'd run out of light pretty quickly.

Rather than thinking of boundaries I instead thought of individual atoms being either moving or not, but I don't know what it gets you.

I also wondered if (normal) light passing through a slowed glass of water would travel faster or slower than it would through a normal glass of water. Then I started thinking about energy-mass equivalence and couldn't think of a good way to deal with that. Eventually I decided that I would have to completely reinvent physics to make everything work out and I decided to give it a miss.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Well, I have a problem accepting that SOME particles would move and others wouldn't - getting the physics for something like that to work seems nearly impossible. That's why I thought time would move in certain parts of space and not others.

Also, the basic law of optics is that light travels between two points along the quickest path, and the local speed of light varies in materials. So in essence, if you slowed time in a part of space, the speed of light would also slow - actually, slowing light and slowing time might just be the same thing - and the index of refraction would rise.

[jwgh]

If it's a boundary thing then you have to figure out what happens at the boundary, though, and that seems equally impossible to me.

Also, once objects in each region start travelling at different speeds and so have their own little inertial frames I suspect things start breaking down in a pretty unpleasant manner.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Physics is all about boundaries! The differential equations do nothing useful without boundary conditions!

Maxwell's equations would seem to be easy to solve for regions of varying c, but it's not obiovus what to do about Newton. And I've done far too little with relativistic equations to know if they can be adapted to a varying c, and if you could derive new low-velocity approximations for mechanics from those.

[jwgh]

I think we need to get the luminiferous æther in here someplace.

Slowing time would SPEED UP light, wouldn't it?

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

Slowed-down matter would have less of a chance to interact with light passing through it, so it would slow down the light less than normal, no?

Re: Slowing time would SPEED UP light, wouldn't it?

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of assuming light would be just as affected as everything else by the slowing down of time. So the exact same interactions would happen, only slower.

But that means

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

the speed of light is not constant, all this relativistic analysis is totally out the window, and anything goes!

[omarius.livejournal.com]

I always thought the killer for all this would be your own inertia--whether you stop the Earth or the whole Universe, you would suddenly find yourself in a situation where your relative motion is waaaaay different than it was when you were standing on a planet that was previously moving at an impressive clip around ol' sol and rotating too. You'd either go "splat" or "wheeeee!"

Unless the "solid" air kept you in place. Then you'd just turn to goo.

Or maybe you're right about the heat thing, which could explain what we observe to be "spontaneous" combustion.

[jwgh]

Hmmm. This seems wrong to me, but I'm not sure why. (paracelsvs says, "probably because the whole idea is wrong from the start." Well, OK.)

It seems to me that since the things that look 'frozen' are all things that are simultaneous in your frame of reference, and since simultaneousness is a relative thing (events simultaneous in one frame of reference aren't in another) that you probably have to pick the frame of reference that you want to be 'frozen' in. Gah.

[muffyjo]

ok, wait, now, we freeze and then burn (which creates its own light) and if you explode, do you see things slowly expand? And woudl you take the earth with you or would it implode as a reaction to explosions in reverse time? Have we simply explained teh existence of black holes and where they actually came from and how things can ACTUALLY exist in a black hole? I mean, if light and time both slow down in a black hole, then objects can exist in slow motion, right?

[jwgh]

Gaah, I made a mistake in the original version of my post. If you're 'sped up', the surrounding world seems colder, not faster, I think. I've fixed this.

[jwgh]

In relativity someone in one frame of reference will observe objects in a different frame of reference as being sped up or slow down. In order for two objects to have noticably different observable time differences their frames of reference have to be radically different -- travelling at a large fraction of the speed of light relative to each other or being in very different gravitational situations or experiencing very different accellerations.

The reason that you get frozen [not burned -- silly mistake] in my scenario is that you're surrounded by air that's experiencing time differently and therefore seems to be moving more slowly, and which therefore seems 'cold'. In the universe as it is, you're not going to get close enough to an object that's in a majorly different frame of reference to get frozen or burned ... except maybe if you get sucked into a black hole, in which case you can expect to get torn apart into little pieces by tidal forces anyway.

I AM TALKING OUT OF MY BUTT!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

One problem is that, by human standards, the temperature difference associated with any really interesting change in rate would be large. We live up around 300 degrees Kelvin, and we can only survive in a range of a few dozen degrees around that; but approximating air as an ideal gas, that number scales as the square of the speed of the molecules.

Of course, to think about it in much more detail leads pretty quickly to physical absurdity. For instance, it's often said that gravitational potential differences cause time to go at different rates, but really it's more accurate to say that a gravitational potential difference IS a variation in the rate of time. If you work out what it does to the wave functions of particles, you see that the time difference is actually what causes the gravitational force! So if, say, you were in a little bubble of fast-time with everything around you going more slowly, by whatever magical means that came about, the time difference would induce an outward gravitational force in the transition zone that would suck all the air out of your bubble. If it were just confined to your body, it might pull your skin off or something.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And from the fact that the time variations we observe due to Earth's gravity are extremely minute and can only be measured with atomic clocks, you can probably guess that the force involved would be REALLY FREAKING HUGE.

[avocado123.livejournal.com]

I thought atomic clocks were trendy wall timepieces in the 1950s, the heyday of space age design? "The Big Knife" has a great atomic chandelier in it.

What? Why is everyone looking at me like that?

ISO POLICE

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

THERE IS NO DEGREE KELVIN. THERE IS ONLY KELVIN.

If you assume that both your negative energy bubble and the surrounding normal space can somehow be "flat," then the scary repulsive forces would all be concentrated in the very edge of the bubble--making them even more frighteningly strong, but repelling only the matter that the very edge of your bubble passes through. And you'd certainly want at least the inside of the bubble to be flat, or else different parts of your body would be running at different speeds!

And the magical means that something like this presupposes is, of course, some kind of background medium superimposed on our space that's filled with energy (which is to say matter) that doesn't interact with ordinary particles through ordinary forces other than gravity. As Gary Numan might put it, welcome to new ether.

The Miniature Golf Course that Time Forgot

[dumplechan.livejournal.com]

Actually, scenario (1) is really the most plausible. You see, a temporal anomaly would lead to a resonance field effect, leading to a near-total Fourier phlogiston destabilization. Matter foci would develop at neo-Euclidean lattice points. This, in turn, allows for non-linear quantum networks (at least, if you accept the Sapirsky hypothesis!).

According to my computations, there is an 85.6% probability that the subject could continue to move through "space" normally, although it would likely cause a very severe rash.

Re: The Miniature Golf Course that Time Forgot

[waider.livejournal.com]

Apply this topical cream to the affected areas. Consult your physician if symptoms persist.

Re: The Miniature Golf Course that Time Forgot

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Whoa there, propellerhead. What's with all the complex talk? "Topical?" "Persist?" Let's go back to what that dumplechan feller was saying about the Fourier phlogiston destabilization.

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

I remember thinking about this after physics in high school one time. I also pondered the effect a sped up person would have on the world. Would they set things on fire by touching them, just because their molecules were moving faster? Would dead skin molecules flaking off them burst into tiny little flames when they contacted slow air? This is of course assuming that the individual moving at a rate where the air does not become a liquid or solid.

-- Schwa ---